I have a word of advice for the readers of this column: Do not make fun of pasta. My religious sensibilities will be offended, and I shall compel the government to take action against you.
You see, I belong to a religion called Pastafarianism, and we worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM). We follow a religious text called the Loose Canon. If we stay true to its principles, we shall get to Heaven, where there are beer volcanoes and stripper factories. What’s more… wait, why are you snickering? Are you making fun of the FSM? Do you not realise that I am protected by Indian law against being offended?
Close to 2,000 cops spent the entire Sunday night hunting for a cabbie who had stolen an expensive mobile phone belonging to member of Parliament and yesteryear actor Vinod Khanna’s son, Saakshi. Nakabandis were put in place across south Mumbai and the suburbs and a message was flashed to all police stations and patrolling vehicles. The taxi’s owner was traced in no time and the mobile was recovered from the cabbie’s house in Behrampada, Bandra (east) on Monday afternoon.
Thirty-five-year Savita Jangam, a resident of Worli Village, lives in constant fear. She can hardly sleep. Savita was like another normal woman till a few days ago, but an incident on April 8 made her lose her mental balance. She was stripped, beaten and paraded half-naked by villagers and hung on a tree for nine hours at her native village in Bhor, Pune, before being rescued by her husband.
[...]
“We approached the local police station in Bhor on the same day, but initially, the officials refused to register our complaint,” [her husband] Gopal said.
Needless to say, the location of the above incidents is irrelevant. In this country, if you’re rich and influential, the police are like your personal servants. If you’re poor, you don’t exist. That’s all there is to it.
Posted by Amit Varma on 18 April, 2007 in
India |
News
Q: What do you think about Rahul Gandhi’s comment that his family divided Pakistan?
A: See, our socialist values do not encourage division of society. In fact, we encourage a European Union model where everyone can live together. Rahul, who the Congress says is its prime ministerial candidate of the future doesn’t know anything.
Heh. Such options we have when it comes to political leadership, no?
It seems like a gimmick, but how it worked. Sometime back, the Indian rock band Pentagram got together with VH1 and announced that they were going to ask their fans to make a music video for their next release, “Voice.” Making a video takes a lot of effort: listening to the song dozens of times, coming up with a concept, getting together cast and crew and props and so on, shooting the thing, editing the thing, and so on. You’d have imagined a handful of nuts would enter.
Pentagram got 991 entries.
Yes, that’s right, 991 music videos. A decade ago, when I worked in first Channel [V] and then MTV and wrote for Rock Street Journal, many of us thought that Indian rock was just about to take off in a big way. We were wrong then—there wasn’t much of a following for it outside the college circuit. But if 991 people make music videos for a song, you’ve got to imagine that the number of actual Pentagram fans out there must be many multiples of that. Who knows where this could go?
Anyway, Pentagram eventually used a composite of the 26 best videos as their official video release. But the rest are available on YouTube. One that Pentagram vocalist Vishal Dadlani especially likes, and that Mohit brought to my attention, is an anti-reservation video by Varun Agarwal from Bangalore. Here it is:
[S]he has blue blood running in her veins, no mixes anywhere. Her name is Sultana Begum and she is the great granddaughter-in-law of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar.
Neither the Bengal government nor the Centre has — in her own words — bothered to help her or shown any respect to her bloodline.
Well, why should they? I can’t think of a good reason why our tax money should go towards helping someone purely because she is the heir of a former emperor. Her sense of entitlement is baffling. She is welcome to private charity dispensed willingly, but to demand that the hard-earned money I pay as taxes go to her upkeep is outrageous. Such shamelessness.
On the other hand, if I was Bahadur Shah Zafar’s descendant, I’d want the Kohinoor back. “That’s mah stone,” I’d yell. “Give me mah stone, and mah throne while you’re at it. And where’s the harem? I want an harem. Organise!”
Posted by Amit Varma on 17 April, 2007 in
Freedom |
India |
News
This character’s creator described him as “insufferable”, and called him a “detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep”. On August 6 1975, the New York Times carried his obituary, the only time it has thus honoured a fictional character. Who?
Posted by Amit Varma on 19 April, 2007 in
Essays and Op-Eds |
Freedom |
India |
Thinking it Through
